page_title: El Anatsui
section_title: Art
hierarchical_section_title: El Anatsui / Art
caption_attribution_description: detailEnglish: Close up of Man's Cloth by El Anatsui showing the bottleneck wrapper construction of the artwork. On public display at The British Museum, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
context_page_description: El Anatsui is a Ghanaian sculptor active for much of his career in Nigeria. He has drawn particular international attention for his "bottle-top installations". These installations consist of thousands of aluminum pieces sourced from alcohol recycling stations and sewn together with copper wire, which are then transformed into metallic cloth-like wall sculptures. Such materials, while seemingly stiff and sturdy, are actually free and flexible, which often helps with manipulation when installing his sculptures.
context_section_description: Anatsui uses clay, wood and found objects to create sculptures based on traditional Ghanaian beliefs and other subjects. He has cut wood with chainsaws and blackened it with acetylene torches. After Anatsui's move from Winneba to Nsukka to pursue a career in education at the University of Nigeria, wood became less accessible to him. This drove him to pursue clay as a medium. His "Broken Pots: Sculpture by El Anatsui" was a series of vessels formed from shards of existing and created pottery. This series was Anatsui's first experiment with using many parts to create a whole, often providing new context or meaning to the pieces he was using.
  
  More recently, he has turned to installation art. Some of his works resemble woven cloths such as kente cloth, but are intended as sculptures, not textiles. These works are made from found objects, usually metal bottle caps which are tied together with wire to create vast sculptures that resemble tapestries. Anatsui incorporates "Adinsubli", a portmanteau of uli, nsibidi, and Adinkra symbols, alongside Ghanaian motifs, into his works.
  Anatsui said that in developing his art he looked for "something that had more relationship to me, as someone growing up in an African country". He wanted to "draw connections between consumption, waste, and the environment". According to Anatsui, "Art grows out of each particular situation, and I believe that artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up".
  A Western art critic has said that Anatsui's bottle tops could be compared to "Duchamp's bicycle wheel" and "recall disparate Modernist sweet spots without quite settling into any familiar category."
caption: Man's Cloth (detail), London exhibition
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